Book Image

NLTK Essentials

By : Nitin Hardeniya
Book Image

NLTK Essentials

By: Nitin Hardeniya

Overview of this book

<p>Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the field of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics that deals with the interactions between computers and human languages. With the instances of human-computer interaction increasing, it’s becoming imperative for computers to comprehend all major natural languages. Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is one such powerful and robust tool.</p> <p>You start with an introduction to get the gist of how to build systems around NLP. We then move on to explore data science-related tasks, following which you will learn how to create a customized tokenizer and parser from scratch. Throughout, we delve into the essential concepts of NLP while gaining practical insights into various open source tools and libraries available in Python for NLP. You will then learn how to analyze social media sites to discover trending topics and perform sentiment analysis. Finally, you will see tools which will help you deal with large scale text.</p> <p>By the end of this book, you will be confident about NLP and data science concepts and know how to apply them in your day-to-day work.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
NLTK Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Rare word removal


This is very intuitive, as some of the words that are very unique in nature like names, brands, product names, and some of the noise characters, such as html leftouts, also need to be removed for different NLP tasks. For example, it would be really bad to use names as a predictor for a text classification problem, even if they come out as a significant predictor. We will talk about this further in subsequent chapters. We definitely don't want all these noisy tokens to be present. We also use length of the words as a criteria for removing words with very a short length or a very long length:

>>># tokens is a list of all tokens in corpus
>>>freq_dist = nltk.FreqDist(token)
>>>rarewords = freq_dist.keys()[-50:]
>>>after_rare_words = [ word for word in token not in rarewords]

We are using the FreqDist() function to get the distribution of the terms in the corpus, selecting the rarest one into a list, and then filtering our original corpus...